


Exit Stage Left

by penguistifical



Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-21
Updated: 2020-01-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:53:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22341349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/penguistifical/pseuds/penguistifical
Summary: “Just a friend, I hope?”exit stage left: to leave a scene in a quiet, unobtrusive method, so as not to disturb the action continuing on stagea what could have been, after the djinn
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Comments: 33
Kudos: 1226





	Exit Stage Left

**Author's Note:**

> exit stage left: to leave a scene in a quiet, unobtrusive method, so as not to disturb the action continuing on stage
> 
> a what could have been, post the djinn
> 
> (Has spoilers of episode 5 of the Netflix series)

  
Jaskier has his life, he has his lute, and, thank the gods, he has his voice.   
  
All things considered, he’s narrowly escaped a nasty encounter with a djinn and come out mostly unharmed. He should be feeling cheerful and inspired, ready to begin another epic composition in which he stars as the dramatic hero.

He feels miserable. 

He’d dashed out of whatever witchery was going on after making his final wish, and come out to see the sunshine and Geralt. They should have closed this chapter of their adventures, and left. Together.

Instead, Geralt had gone back into the danger.    
  
Geralt’s fine, now, he’s alive, they’re both alive, the two of them, the witcher and the sorceress inside. Together.

Just a short while ago Jaskier was vomiting blood. He feels bitterness welling up in him now, instead.   


Chireadan, the healer, had clapped Jaskier on the shoulder and said he’d be returning to his medical pavilion, now that everything was fine.   


It was high time a bard headed out as well.

Rinde was near. It’d be easiest to head back that way, play for dinner, find a pile of straw for the night, and work out beginning to travel solo again.

He’s not quite sure where his belongings are, his memories of recent hours are blurred together unpleasantly in his mind, but he’s had to make do with little before. A few inns, several good crowds, he’ll have coin enough to build back what he doesn’t have. 

He recognizes, even as he pulls himself together outside the mansion to begin walking to Rinde, that this is a terrible plan. It’s a bad choice to head out without his coin and belongings of the road, but he’ll be damned if he goes to talk to the witcher right now and have their final words be about where his fucking purse is.    
And he doesn’t want to see that sorceress either right now, or ever.   
  
“Jaskier?”   
  
The bard turned, uneasily, towards the woman in the doorway calling to him, as if she’d been summoned by the thought. Yennefer gave him a cool look, and beckoned him over with a languid wave.

“You know my name?” he asks, planting his feet.

“The witcher said it a few times while bargaining for your life, yes. I’m Yennefer.”

Jaskier wishes he could remember just a little more. He’s woken up pleasantly fuzzy-headed in many beds before, but a djinn hadn’t been involved, to say the least. He’d been fading in and out of consciousness with the pain the wish was wracking on his body, and he doesn’t remember most of what Geralt had said to Yennefer.    
  
For that matter, he has little enough memory of her, which leaves him feeling on uneven footing as she looks him over with a little too much interest for his comfort.   
  
“You’re no mutant,” she says.

“Ah, no, just a, uh, regular, whatever I am.”

That sparks something, and he does dimly recall that too-perceptive gaze on him, and her asking Geralt,  _ “Just a friend, I hope? _ ”

He’d hoped for a little more than that. He’s a fool.

“It’s a rare thing for people to look upset to  _ not _ be called a mutant.” Yennefer continues, and Jaskier realizes he’s looking a little too openly dejected. 

“No, I, I was just thinking.” Jaskier shakes his head, getting control of himself. “I need to be going. I’ll leave you two be.”

She gives him an odd look, and beckons again. “Come here, first, before you step out on your errand. This won’t take long.”

It’s not going to be an errand, he’s not coming back. He doesn’t want to hear that he needs to go, so he’ll leave before that can happen.

But, Yennefer is waiting impatiently, he’s a bit curious, and this will probably lead him to him leaving the fastest if he just concedes.

So he goes over to the entrance of the mayor’s looking-worse-for-the-wear mansion. It’s more thoroughly wrecked than any banquet he’s ever left that became a brawl. 

He hesitates by the somewhat splintered doorway. “I, ah, wished to never return, I believe? I don’t want to mess with any djinn magic for at least an, oh, I don’t know, ever again.”

Yennefer smiles at him, and though he only vaguely remembers seeing her pose seductively on her dais, swaying in black gown and mask, her smile now is as if she’s taken off a second mask. It’s not calculated, she’s genuinely amused. 

“The djinn was not yours to command. Such creatures strike out at those who would use them, twisting an earnest wish into revealing a terrible hidden price. If you had been the djinn’s master, and if you had wished for it to use its powers to keep you from ever returning to a place,” she looks him square in the eyes, “It would probably have fulfilled the wish by killing you.”

Oh. 

“I did almost die today, you know.” he mutters, feeling defensive.   


“Thanks to me, you did not.” she says easily.

Thanks to Geralt, also, Jaskier thinks, and doesn't answer this.

“And, I mean, normally it’d be the highlight of my day to be pinned and held against the wall by, ah, how did I put it earlier?” Right, ‘insanely sexy witch,’ but he probably shouldn’t say that. “By an insanely sexy witch,”  
  
Fuck.  
  
“Listen, that was far too much pressure for anybody to come up with a clever wish.” he finishes, pointing a finger in her smiling face.   


Well, a sorceress probably isn’t easily intimidated by anyone. And he does like seeing her smile, despite himself.

“You’re awfully tongue-tied for a bard.” she says, and laughs softly when he sputters and steps into the mansion after her, all fear forgotten in his indignation.

“You’ve heard my tales, you must have hummed my melodies. I take time to compose, as musicians do! You….”

Yennefer turns to him in the hallway, waiting.

He’d meant to end with something not complimentary, but she’s insulted his bardic abilities, and well, she did save his life.   


“You….”    
  
She’d cloaked her mysterious beauty with a mask, and surrounded herself with a symphony of moans from a decadent orgy that he really, really wishes he could remember a little more about, but it doesn’t seem right to finish this in praise of her looks. She’s probably certain that he’s about to say something in the vein of her sexual appeal, and he doesn’t want to be predictable.

“You have the look of a deep and still river iced over in winter,” he says. “Something powerful and dangerous in a state of perfect, beautiful calm. If one stepped out without caution, without respect for the waters underneath the ice, they would easily find themselves plunging through to a certain and breathless death.”

Jaskier is rewarded again by Yennefer’s genuine smile of pleasure, and he feels like he may be stepping out onto that ice, a bit.

“A bard after all.” she says, and he beams back at her in return before remembering that the second she finishes with him, he’s going to leave.

He was supposed to already have left. This is getting so much worse by the moment.

Instead, he follows her into a room where there is a pile of pillows and blankets and a sleeping witcher that he doesn’t want to walk away from.

Yennefer gives the air around Jaskier a quick examination, and then shrugs slightly.

“No trace of anything remaining. The djinn has departed.” she says quietly.

“I thought you said I wasn’t its master at all?” Jaskier hisses back, with a look to the sleeping witcher on the ground to make sure he’s not being too loud.

“You weren’t, but I wanted to check back where I began the ritual to make sure you were fully safe. I was rather busy when you fled,” and as he continues to look at her, indignant, “I could undo its magics, had there been any problem and you started coughing again.”

He believes her, but can’t stop himself from putting his hand to his throat in reflexive fear, and he sees her gaze soften. He doesn’t want her to be looking at him with any sympathy, so he instead pads over the sheets on the ground to Geralt.

He regards the witcher, finally asleep, and considers the merits of kicking him the shoulder to say he’s leaving and where are his things?    
  
Jaskier swallows, an awkward lump in his throat. It still hurts.

“Well, if that’s all you wanted, I’m going, then.” He turns to leave the room but is stopped by a hand on his ankle. He looks down to see Geralt gazing up at him blearily. 

“Why do we need to be going?”

Jaskier could say something cruel that’s a reversal of all the times Geralt has told the bard not to accompany him, but he can’t get the words out.   
He hadn’t meant to come in to say goodbye, or _anything_ , and he’s furious with himself when he feels tears pricking in his eyes.

Yennefer and Geralt are both looking at him, Yennefer trying to understand his silence, Geralt looking concerned.

“I thought he was all right?” Geralt asks Yennefer as he reaches for the bard, pulling him down on the makeshift bed.   
  
“He is,” Yennefer insists. “But he’s probably still feeling the after-effects of the djinn’s power. Magic that changes the body in such a way is intensely painful."

Jaskier doesn’t know why she knows, but she sounds certain and he gives her a sympathetic nod in reflex as she comes to sit next to him on a pillow.   
  


She makes a strange sign in the air, staring into the distance at nothing, focused on something he cannot perceive. “No, nothing of the djinn remains, and I already brought him in to be sure."

Jaskier feels Geralt’s hand explore his neck, fingers gentle as he checks for injury. He reaches up to roughly pull the witcher’s hand away and instead finds himself clinging to Geralt’s wrist.

“I’m fine.” he chokes out.

“Then, where do we need to go right now?” Geralt asks, voice still a little rougher than usual with tiredness. “So help me, Jaskier, this began because I needed sleep, and, right now, I am going to go back to sleep.”

Jaskier mumbles something about going to get water for his throat.

“That’s all?” Geralt asks.

Jaskier nods, ready for the witcher to release him and lie back down, for Yennefer to turn away, and then he’ll leave them both here.   
Instead, Geralt reaches over to brush a thumb against the corner of Jaskier’s eye, and Jaskier realizes he actually is going to cry, is starting to cry already.

“Jaskier?” Geralt asks, just as concerned as he’d asked when Jaskier had first doubled over in pain from the djinn.

He attempts to stand, to leave, but Geralt firmly keeps him in place with a hand on his shoulder.

“What’s wrong?”   


Though he doesn’t have all his memories of what’s gone on for the last day, he’s still kept the soreness in his throat, the tiredness he feels in all his muscles, and the recent scab of the emotions from trying to process the thought that Geralt was dead.

And, besides all of that, he has the knowledge that Geralt and Yennefer want each other, which means that Geralt doesn’t want him.

He tries to think of a way to explain this, to turn the situation into a grand dramatic departure. Sometimes, words fail even a bard.    
  
“I thought you’d want me to leave,” Jaskier mumbles, eventually.

“Why?” both Yennefer and Geralt ask, and he means to laugh at getting them to speak in unison, but the honest puzzlement in both their voices makes him sob instead.

Geralt takes him in his arms and he presses his face into the witcher’s chest, wondering at the rumors that witchers have no emotions.

“He’s worn out,” he hears Yennefer telling Geralt. “It’s because he was used as one of your wish foci, and he’s just a man.” Jaskier wants to say something about being “just a man” but it feels nice to be held and worried over.

“I’m not just a man and I’m worn out,” rumbles Geralt.

“Well, let me know if you’d like to cry into my arms and I’ll oblige.” she answers.

Geralt chuckles, but it’s not unkind, and as he’s running his hands through Jaskier’s hair and rubbing gentle circles onto the back of Jaskier’s neck, the bard finds he doesn’t mind it at all.

He feels Yennefer’s hand on his shoulder and looks around to see her offering him a flask.  
  
Trying to put back on his performer’s persona, he gives her a crooked grin and says, “Some potion, sorceress?”

“Yes, a very dangerous brew.” she tells him, deadpan. “It’s apple juice. Drink something, it will help your throat.” 

He gets the sense, from the brusque offer, that she may not be used to giving or receiving kindnesses. With this in mind, he reaches out for the drink and says, with all of the honesty he can muster in the situation, “Thank you,” and hopes that it'll suffice. As he’s currently being cradled in the witcher’s arms and still has tearstains on his face, he certainly has no dignity to muster.

“That was terribly serious for juice.”

“I mean, thank you for my life. But yes, also for bringing apple juice.”

Yennefer and Geralt share a smile about that, some kind of inside joke he doesn’t understand about bringing apple juice, but, as he sips the drink and relaxes back into Geralt’s hold, he realizes, again, that he doesn’t mind.

The lives of sorceresses and witchers are so complicated by sigils and signs, by magic and monsters, that it must be that they don’t see any need for complications when it comes to anything else, like relationships.  
  
Well, good. If they don’t, neither does he.

Yennefer returns to sit next to them, spreading out a parchment on the ground to study an array of symbols he can’t make heads or tails of. Geralt leans back onto the blankets and closes his eyes. Because he’s still holding Jaskier, the bard finds himself also lying down, head still against Geralt’s chest.

A few hours ago, he’d sincerely wished to leave this place forever, and never return.

As Jaskier relaxes between the two of them, drifting off to sleep, his last thought for a while is that it’s a damn good thing he hadn’t actually been the one making the wishes.   


**Author's Note:**

> guess who wrote this to procrastinate writing on other things ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ


End file.
